The room erupts.
“What’s going on?” Jenna asks.
Her target gives a look of disapproval. “Maybe we should get out of here,” he says.
No, this is the perfect distraction. She watches as about eight or nine girls—if they’re eighteen, it’s by a day—are escorted into the room. They wear heavy makeup, the way you do when you think it will make you look older, but their scared eyes and rolled shoulders tell the story. They’re ushered into the basement.
Chief starts up the chant. “Game night, game night, game night.”
It starts as a rumble but builds to a crescendo as the men start pounding on the bar, stomping their feet.
“Game night?” Jenna asks.
Before the SEC guy answers, she overhears one of his frat brothers say, “Remember that townie at the Vineyard? She didn’t walk for a week.”
Jenna doesn’t like the sound of this.
“Let’s get out of here,” the mark says.
“Let’s stay awhile. I like games.”
In the basement, a group of four men and four girls are playing cards, strip poker by the looks of their state of dress—two girls down to bras, a guy in his boxers, another with no shirt, his hairy chest glistening with sweat.
There’s a round of beer pong at a table in the back.
Jenna doesn’t like it, not one bit, but everything appears consensual. Stock college boy nonsense.
None of the weird ritualist frat boy stuff she’s feared. It’s time to do what she’s come to do. She fingers the packet of fentanyl in her handbag.
As she’s leaving, Chief, full-on drunk now, announces it’s time for Target Jeopardy. There’s a podium set up with a TV monitor next to it. Up pops the familiar blue categories for Jeopardy on the screen.
The girls are lined up in front of the podium, the men in the spectator section behind them. Maybe it’s a drinking game set to Jeopardy questions, Jenna thinks.
But it’s more grotesque. Chief stands like a deranged game show host and asks the first girl to pick a category. She’s glassy-eyed, more than tipsy, and she giggles. She chooses World History.
When she gets the answer wrong, Jenna is startled as the men begin shooting paintball guns. The sound— whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—fills the room. The girl wails as she’s pelted. She’s shirtless, down to her bra, large welts are already appearing on her back, and the firing doesn’t stop until she’s curled on the floor.
The next girl says, “I don’t want to.”
But Chief says, “Pick a category, bitch!”
Jenna looks around. The men are riled up, eyes alight.
The girl shakes her head, refuses to pick a category.
Chief makes a noise like a buzzer. “Aw, looks like you’re out of time.”
The firing begins again.
The other girls are bawling now, which only seems to get the men more amped up.
Jenna looks at the SEC guy. “We need to stop this.”
He shrugs, grimaces, like nothing I can do. The paintball gun they placed on the table for him sits unused.
Before the leader asks the next girl her category, Jenna grabs the paintball gun, walks up to the podium. The leader looks perplexed, then horrified when Jenna puts the barrel of the rifle to his crotch and pulls the trigger, point-blank. Whoosh.
Chief wails, falls to the floor. Jenna feels figures lurching toward her. She takes the gun and whoosh, a paint pellet slams one guy in the face, whoosh another point-blank in the chest. Both are on the floor.
Seeing what’s happening, the other men start pushing out of the basement, jamming the stairwell.
Jenna picks up one of the other paintball guns and starts blasting them, screaming “What category? ”
Jenna is yanked out of the memory when she sees the police lights as she pulls up Connecticut Avenue. The front awning of the District Inn is bordered with yellow-and-black tape. Three patrol cars crouch in the lot, bathed in blue from the strobes.
She’s come to the hotel because of its reputation. A dangerous place nestled bizarrely in an affluent enclave in upper northwest D.C. The neighbors have rallied against the hotel—it’s had four murders in the past year—to no avail. It’s not far from Jenna’s own house, and coming here has spared her having to venture to the city to find a place that takes cash and doesn’t require ID.
Jenna drives past the unsightly yellow building and finds a parking space on Albemarle Street.
She took Billy’s number from Willow so she could let him know where to find his Jeep. She’ll see if she can find a pay phone. The District Inn might have one to cater to its clientele, prostitutes and drug dealers, the rare few who still favor pay phones.
Jenna walks confidently on the sidewalk, past the Flagship carwash, the Burger King, the ZIPS
dry cleaner, and stops at the perimeter. She’s dog-tired after the three-hour return drive and she probably looks it, but nothing a District cop on the night shift will give a second look.
The officer manning the perimeter gives her a weary once-over.
“I’m staying at the hotel.… Can I go in yet?”
The officer shrugs, lifts the yellow band of tape.
She strolls inside the lobby. It’s covered in a sickly haze from fluorescents. The guy working the reception desk wears a cheap suit and has a lazy eye, which seems fitting. He’s watching the cops outside, who seem to be wrapping things up.
“Eventful night,” Jenna says.
The guy turns his good eye to her. He seems surprised, perhaps because it’s 2:30 a.m. and she’s not a prostitute.
“I need a room for the night.”
The guy nods, asks for a credit card.
“I’d prefer to pay with cash, if that works?” She puts down three hundred-dollar bills, a tiny portion of the cash she took with her from the lockbox. The sign on the door says $200 for a single, a steal in D.C. where rooms average at least $500 a night. She probably won’t think it’s a bargain when she sees the room.
The clerk sighs, frowns at the bills. “Three hundred ain’t gonna cover it if you steal something.”
“What could there possibly be to steal?” Jenna asks.
The man chuckles. “Oh, I don’t know. The TV. Towels.”
Jenna puts another hundred on the counter.
“One more of those,” the guy says, “and you gotta be out by ten in the morning when my shift ends.”
“Deal,” she says, slapping another bill on the counter.
She takes the only elevator to the fifth floor. The ugly carpet in the hallway smells of rug cleaner and mold, and she’s thinking maybe it would’ve been worth the risk to go somewhere nicer in Bethesda. But it’s safer if she doesn’t register, doesn’t use credit cards, in case her aliases have been breached.
Inside, the room is exactly as one would expect. Heavy curtains with a layer of dust, floral
bedspread, stained carpet. But she’s so tired it doesn’t matter. She needs a shower and some sleep.
She turns on the television and finds Channel 7, the local twenty-four-hour news station. It’s not live, she knows. The news is on a loop in between infomercials.
There’s a story about the shooting downtown at the Capital Grille:
“Fear gripped downtown this afternoon as shots were fired near a popular D.C. restaurant where tech billionaire Artemis Templeton was dining,” the newscaster says. An image of Artemis’s bald head appears on the screen. “Templeton, a pioneer in the early days of social-media technology, and who in recent years has focused on everything from next-gen artificial intelligence to e-commerce, is number three on Forbes’s list of the richest tech titans. It’s unclear whether Templeton was a target of the shooter. Both police and Templeton have declined to comment.” The report goes on: An officer has a nasty leg wound after being injured by some type of weapon. Police are looking for two white females who are persons of interest.